5 battery technologies that would make your phone last longer and charge faster

Whoever, or, rather, whichever team, as scientific discoveries today are rarely made by a single person, reinvents the battery, will become billionaire overnight is the common understanding of Wall Street analysts betting on breakthroughs in battery tech.

It won't be long before everything - from our cell phones, through our cars, to our houses - uses some sort of electricity storage that ought to be cheaper and much more efficient than what we have now.

We are on the cusp of battery technology breakthroughs that would allow our spec'd-out smartphones to last for days, our cars to drive 500+ miles on a charge, and our houses to store enough energy derived from solar panels or other sources to last days on end without resorting to the grid.

That's why we are rounding up a few of these promising inventions that should finally put to rest our range and battery endurance anxieties, and what you will see in the slideshow below are good candidates for those multimillion bonuses when the breakthroughs reach commercial viability.

5 battery technologies that would make your phone last longer and charge faster

USC just came up with an invention that is not five or ten years in the future as most other battery breakthrough promises. Using microscopic porous silicon spheres for the anode, the researchers managed to achieve fast ion release on the cheap.

The result - three times more storage than the conventional battery in your smartphone, and 10 minute charging times. To top it all off, once the charge/discharge cycles number is increased, the technology will be good to go into batteries, and this is poised to happen in two or three years.

The silicon anode conundrum might have been cracked, but what about the cathode, the part that is responsible for releasing the quickly absorbed energy? Stanford comes to the rescue here, developing a "sulfur-coated hollow carbon nanofibers and an electrolyte additive to fabricate a superior rechargeable lithium battery cathode." The result - four to five times the energy storage compared to existing lithium ion battery technology.

Enough with the silicon electrodes breakthroughs, how about the good old oxygen we breath? IBM, in collaboration with researchers, government labs and industry leaders, is working on Project 500 - a lithium-air battery undertaking that is supposed to give electric cars as much range as your typical gas tank, and since Li-air batteries are suitable for any application where weight is important, phones are a perfect candidate for them as well. IBM expects a fully working prototype to be demonstrated this year.

"How it works: During discharge (driving), oxygen from the air reacts with lithium ions, forming lithium peroxide on a carbon matrix. Upon recharge, the oxygen is given back to the atmosphere and the lithium goes back onto the anode."

Brave new ideas are pretty far out there in terms of commercialization, but there could be tweaks to existing tech that achieve much better results, too. Researchers from Washington State University are working to improve the anode with easy to obtain materials like tin.

Applied in a novel way, tin nanoneedles on the anode can store three times as much capacity as conventional graphite, and allow batteries to be recharged much faster and many more times than what we have now in our cell phones.

On top of that, the material and process used will be much cheaper when they go into production, and makers don't need to redesign the way they produce batteries when this invention materializes commercially in a year or two.

So far we've been talking mostly about improvements involving nanomaterials, but these are not easy or cheap to produce. Along comes the marine snail that is typically chilling off the Californian coast, unsuspecting of the idea University of California researcher is getting from is teeth. With up to 80 parallel rows the chiton first grinds rock to get to the algae it eats, and the first rows get quickly worn out, but replaced at the same rate, and the process happens at room temperature.

The researchers are starting to use the same procedure to grow nanocrystals, as those used in Li-ion batteries research, at the fraction of the cost typically involved, which which will lead to much faster charging juicers produced on the cheap.

Nanocrystals for Li-ion batteries inspired by marine snail teeth

http://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/11162

USC just came up with an invention that is not five or ten years in the future as most other battery breakthrough promises. Using microscopic porous silicon spheres for the anode, the researchers managed to achieve fast ion release on the cheap.

The result - three times more storage than the conventional battery in your smartphone, and 10 minute charging times. To top it all off, once the charge/discharge cycles number is increased, the technology will be good to go into batteries, and this is poised to happen in two or three years.

5 battery technologies that would make your phone last longer and charge faster

USC just came up with an invention that is not five or ten years in the future as most other battery breakthrough promises. Using microscopic porous silicon spheres for the anode, the researchers managed to achieve fast ion release on the cheap.

The result - three times more storage than the conventional battery in your smartphone, and 10 minute charging times. To top it all off, once the charge/discharge cycles number is increased, the technology will be good to go into batteries, and this is poised to happen in two or three years.

The silicon anode conundrum might have been cracked, but what about the cathode, the part that is responsible for releasing the quickly absorbed energy? Stanford comes to the rescue here, developing a "sulfur-coated hollow carbon nanofibers and an electrolyte additive to fabricate a superior rechargeable lithium battery cathode." The result - four to five times the energy storage compared to existing lithium ion battery technology.

Enough with the silicon electrodes breakthroughs, how about the good old oxygen we breath? IBM, in collaboration with researchers, government labs and industry leaders, is working on Project 500 - a lithium-air battery undertaking that is supposed to give electric cars as much range as your typical gas tank, and since Li-air batteries are suitable for any application where weight is important, phones are a perfect candidate for them as well. IBM expects a fully working prototype to be demonstrated this year.

"How it works: During discharge (driving), oxygen from the air reacts with lithium ions, forming lithium peroxide on a carbon matrix. Upon recharge, the oxygen is given back to the atmosphere and the lithium goes back onto the anode."

Brave new ideas are pretty far out there in terms of commercialization, but there could be tweaks to existing tech that achieve much better results, too. Researchers from Washington State University are working to improve the anode with easy to obtain materials like tin.

Applied in a novel way, tin nanoneedles on the anode can store three times as much capacity as conventional graphite, and allow batteries to be recharged much faster and many more times than what we have now in our cell phones.

On top of that, the material and process used will be much cheaper when they go into production, and makers don't need to redesign the way they produce batteries when this invention materializes commercially in a year or two.

So far we've been talking mostly about improvements involving nanomaterials, but these are not easy or cheap to produce. Along comes the marine snail that is typically chilling off the Californian coast, unsuspecting of the idea University of California researcher is getting from is teeth. With up to 80 parallel rows the chiton first grinds rock to get to the algae it eats, and the first rows get quickly worn out, but replaced at the same rate, and the process happens at room temperature.

The researchers are starting to use the same procedure to grow nanocrystals, as those used in Li-ion batteries research, at the fraction of the cost typically involved, which which will lead to much faster charging juicers produced on the cheap.

This is very much needed, but mAh/size increase has been teased over years now, yet none of the technologies managed to make it cheap, long lasting and perfectly stable, all of which is a minimum requirement to even consider greenlighting it, and it's another year from that to store shelves, so this is not coming anytime soon.

While we're waiting, would it be so hard for all companies to start NANDFLASH storage from 64gigs all the way up to 256?

Remember the dirt cheap terabyte HDDs? So how come a Nexus 4 still comes out a 8GB with no SD card slot?

Regarding the no MicroSD card slot: I'd have to believe that device manufacturers, cell service carriers and the hardware/software industry in general view "Cloud" storage as a far more profitable resource than large inexpensive local storage. I don't believe the argument that expandable memory in internet devices is expensive, space intensive or excessively power consuming. Its just that an external storage service is far more likely to extract additional cash from comsumers :).

The Nexus 4 and other Google Android devices were released without the sdcard slot with the idea it would make the average user experience less confusing. No app to SDcard, no multiple storage areas to browse in a file browser, and when transferring from device to computer, only one place for all!

Researches at Washington State University have been working on a battery that uses a tin anode rather than a carbon one. They say it is quicker to charge and has three times the capacity. They are currently manufacturing and testing these devices. They say it should hit market by the end of the year.

The world is screaming for better batteries for so many different applications, one way or another with so much research in the field, we should see the light within the next decade or so... Nimh an li ion batteries are merelly better materials for the conventional battery design.... Wish hydrogen was easier to mass produce, those small hydrogen generators and cylinders are quite nifty! (LOL nifty.....)

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